Tag Archives: hostile

In my cover story for this week’s paper, I made a minor mistake. Actually it was fairly major. The opening paragraph of the story, as originally written, stated that 2011 marks the first time in history that all major candidates for Dallas mayor have actively courted the LGBT vote.

As former DV staff writer David Webb pointed out in the comments to the story, that’s not true. In 2002, Laura Miller, Tom Dunning and Domingo Garcia — the three major candidates for mayor — all courted the LGBT vote.

From The Dallas Mornings News on Jan. 15, 2002:

Dallas gays and lesbians, who used to hope that they could just find a candidate who wouldn’t be hostile to their interests, find themselves for the first time being wooed from all directions in what boils down to a three-way citywide race – and disagreeing about whom to support.

“It’s the first time I haven’t had to go vote for the lesser of two evils,” said Deb Elder, a Laura Miller supporter and political organizer. “Nothing has piqued my passion like this mayoral vote.”

Put another way, with major candidates Ms. Miller, Tom Dunning, and Domingo Garcia all touting their support for including gays in a nondiscrimination ordinance, a sector of voters that was shunned not long ago can’t lose this time around.

“It’s historic. I knew it would happen, but I didn’t know it would be this soon,” said Michael Milliken, one of the city’s first publicly identified gay appointees. “The gay community is in a unique position this year.”

I had based my report on statements by openly gay former City Councilman Ed Oakley, who called the 2011 mayoral election “a watershed moment for the community” and “unprecedented.”

While that may be true in some other respects, this isn’t the first time all major mayoral candidates have sought the LGBT vote, and I apologize for the error.

Considering Marquette is a Catholic University, my response almost borders on an obvious, “Duh!” but the study suggests that Marquette takes a perverse pride in being anti-gay.

“We’d like to at least have a safe campus,” said Margaret Steele, a graduate student in Marquette’s philosophy department and an LGBT ally. Steele said she’s familiar with Sanlo’s report and can attest to the hostile climate it documents.

Steele said she attended Marquette hoping to find a values-based educational environment that promotes the Jesuit tradition of social justice. But she said she’s been disappointed to find herself engulfed in a culture that seems to elevate “a couple of ambiguous statements about sexuality” over “the hundreds of scriptural injunctions about helping the poor, the sick and the disenfranchised.”

“For me, Marquette is not Catholic enough,” Steele said. “They use their Catholic identity as window dressing to attract a certain customer base. But they don’t show a true commitment to Christianity or Catholicism at is best. They talk up Catholicism when they want to defend something they’re doing to appease their conservative customers and donors.

The Catholic Church has proven time and again they use homophobic teachings to divert attention from their child rape problem. They are also guilty of trying to appeal to extremist conservative parishioners they haven’t lost to all their pedophilia scandals. Marquette seems to pride itself in taking a hard line, while other Jesuit Catholic Universities including Loyola University Chicago, Loyola Marymount, Georgetown University and Seattle University are moderating their policies.